"The truth is, Count," the mother answered, obviously flattered, "he has great aptitude and learns everything put before him. He has just one fault, he’s sowhat stubborn. But really, regarding what he said about Mithridates, do you truly believe that king used those precautions, and that they actually worked?"
"I believe so, mada," the Count replied. "Because I’ve used them myself to avoid being poisoned in Naples, Palermo, and Smyrna. Three separate occasions when, without those precautions, I would have lost my life."
"And your precautions worked?"
"Completely."
"Yes, I rember now, you ntioned sothing like this to in Perugia."
"Really?" the Count said with remarkably well-feigned surprise. "I honestly didn’t rember."
"I asked you whether poisons affected Northern people the sa way they affected Southern people. You told that the cold, sluggish temperants of Northerners didn’t react the sa way as the passionate, energetic temperants of Southerners."
"Exactly," Monte Cristo confird. "I’ve seen Russians consu vegetable substances without any visible ill effects that would have killed a Neapolitan or an Arab."
"And you truly believe the results would be even more reliable here than in the East? That in our foggy, rainy climate, a person could adapt more easily to this gradual poison absorption than soone in a warm climate?"
"Certainly. Though it’s understood that the person must have been properly fortified against the poison they weren’t accustod to."
"Yes, I understand. And how would you adapt yourself, or rather, how did you adapt yourself to it?"
"Oh, very easily. Suppose you knew in advance which poison would be used against you. Suppose the poison was, for instance, brucine-"
"Brucine cos from false angostura bark, doesn’t it?" Mada de Villefort asked.
"Precisely, mada," Monte Cristo replied. "But I see I have little to teach you. Let complint you on your knowledge. Such learning is very rare among ladies."
"Oh, I know that," Mada de Villefort said. "But I’m passionate about the occult sciences. They speak to the imagination like poetry while being reducible to figures like an algebraic equation. But please continue, what you’re saying interests trendously."
"Well," Monte Cristo replied, "suppose this poison was brucine, and you took one milligram the first day, two milligrams the second day, and so on. At the end of ten days, you’d have taken ten milligrams. After twenty days, increasing by another milligram daily, you’d have taken three hundred milligrams total, a dose you could tolerate without problems, but which would be extrely dangerous for anyone else who hadn’t taken the sa precautions. After a month, when drinking water from the sa pitcher, you would kill the person drinking with you, without experiencing anything worse than slight discomfort yourself. You wouldn’t even realize there was poison mixed in the water."
"Do you know any other antidotes?"
"I don’t."
"I’ve read and reread the history of Mithridates many tis," Mada de Villefort said thoughtfully, "and I always considered it a myth."
"No, mada. Unlike most historical accounts, this one is true. But what you’re telling , what you’re asking , this isn’t just casual curiosity. Two years ago you asked these sa questions and said that this Mithridates story had occupied your mind for a very long ti."
"True, sir. My two favorite subjects in my youth were botany and mineralogy. Later, when I learned that the use of simple plants often explained entire peoples’ histories and individual lives in the East, just as flowers symbolize love affairs, I regretted not being born a man so I could have been a famous chemist like Flal, Fontana, or Cabanis."
"And even more so, mada," Monte Cristo said, "because Easterners don’t just use poisons defensively like Mithridates did, they also use them as weapons. Science becos not only a defensive tool in their hands but even more often an offensive one. One use protects against physical suffering, the other against enemies. With opium, belladonna, plant-based toxins, and cherry laurel, they put to sleep anyone who stands in their way. Every one of those won, Egyptian, Turkish, or Greek, whom you might call ’good won’ here, knows how to use chemistry to fool a doctor and psychology to deceive a priest."
"Really," Mada de Villefort said, her eyes sparkling with strange fire.
"Oh yes, absolutely, mada," Monte Cristo continued. "Eastern secret dramas begin with a love potion and end with a death poison, they start with paradise and end with hell. There are as many different elixirs as there are quirks in human physical and moral nature. And I’ll say more, these chemists’ art can precisely calibrate and adjust both redy and poison to match desires for love or revenge."
"But sir," the young woman remarked, "these Eastern societies where you’ve spent part of your life sound as fantastical as fairy tales. A person can be easily eliminated there. It’s like sothing from the Arabian Nights. The sultans and officials who run society there, what we’d call the governnt in France, are really like characters from those stories, who not only pardon poisoners but even make them pri ministers if their cris were ingenious enough. They have the whole story written in gold letters to entertain themselves during their idle hours."
"Not at all, mada. Fantasy no longer exists in the East. There, disguised under different nas and wearing different costus, are police agents, judges, prosecutors, and sheriffs. They hang, behead, and execute their criminals in the most efficient way possible. But so clever rogues manage to escape human justice and succeed in their sches through cunning. Among us, a simpleton possessed by hatred or greed who has an enemy to destroy or a relative to dispose of goes straight to the grocery store or pharmacy, gives a fake na that makes him even easier to track than his real na would, and claims rats are keeping him awake at night so he needs to buy five or six grams of arsenic. If he’s really cunning, he visits five or six different stores, which just makes him five or six tis easier to trace. Then, when he’s acquired his poison, he gives his enemy or relative a dose of arsenic that would kill an elephant, a dose that, for no good reason, makes his victim groan loudly enough to alarm the entire neighborhood. Then a crowd of police officers arrives. They bring a doctor who opens the corpse and collects arsenic from the stomach and intestines with a spoon. The next day, a hundred newspapers report the cri with the victim’s and murderer’s nas. That sa evening, the store owners co forward saying, ’I sold arsenic to that gentleman.’ Rather than fail to identify the guilty buyer, they’ll identify twenty people. Then the foolish criminal is arrested, imprisoned, interrogated, confronted, confused, convicted, and executed by hanging or guillotine. Or if she’s a woman of so status, they lock her up for life. That’s how you Northerners understand chemistry, mada. Though I must admit, Desrues was more skillful."
"What can I say, sir?" the lady replied, laughing. "We do what we can. Not everyone has the secrets of the dicis or the Borgias."
"Now," the Count replied, shrugging his shoulders, "shall I tell you why people are so stupid about this? It’s because in your theaters, at least judging from the plays I’ve read, they show people swallowing the contents of a vial or licking a poison ring and dropping dead instantly. Five minutes later the curtain falls and the audience leaves. They don’t see the consequences of murder. They don’t see the police detective with his badge or the officers with their squad. So these poor fools think the whole thing is as easy as lying. But go a little outside France, to Aleppo or Cairo, or even just to Naples or Ro, and you’ll see people walking past you in the streets, people standing upright, smiling, looking healthy. If a demon were whispering in your ear, he’d say, ’That man was poisoned three weeks ago. He’ll be dead within a month.’"
"So," Mada de Villefort remarked, "they’ve rediscovered the secret of that famous aqua Tofana poison that was supposedly lost in Perugia."
"Ah, but mada, does humanity ever truly lose anything? The arts change and travel around the world. Things take different nas, and ordinary people don’t recognize them, that’s all. But the results remain the sa. Poisons target specific organs, one affects the stomach, another the brain, another the intestines. The poison triggers a cough, the cough causes lung inflammation or so other ailnt listed in dical books, which is nonetheless definitely fatal. And if it weren’t fatal on its own, it would certainly beco so thanks to redies prescribed by foolish doctors who are generally poor chemists. These treatnts either help or harm the disease, as you prefer. Then you have a human being killed according to all the rules of art and science, and justice learns nothing about it. As a terrible chemist I knew once said, the worthy Abbé Adelmonte of Taormina in Sicily, who studied these national phenona very deeply."
"It’s quite frightening, but deeply fascinating," the young lady said, sitting motionless with attention. "I must confess, I thought these were dieval inventions."
"Yes, no doubt, but improved upon by our modern age. What’s the point of ti, rit awards, dals, honors, and prizes if they don’t lead society toward greater perfection? Yet humanity will never be perfect until we learn to create and destroy. We already know how to destroy, and that’s half the battle."
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